Five NIH-funded investigators in the department of Molecular Biology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center request NCRR funds to purchase a state-of-the-art Zeiss LSM 510 META laser scanning confocal microscope system. The unique features of the LSM 510 META will not only provide an essential replacement for our existing, 10-year old LSM 410 confocal microscope setup, but will substantially extend the functionality of our departmental confocal system. The number of departmental faculty has grown from 8 to 25 since 1993, and the current LSM 410 is neither sufficient nor upgradeable to meet the increased demand and complex imaging needs of the department. Five major and two minor users will make immediate use of the feature set unique to the 510 META systems. The projects include: [unreadable] [unreadable] (1) Analysis of transcriptional effectors in the C. elegans insulin/IGF-signaling pathway (Waddle) [unreadable] (2) Regulatory mechanisms and plasticity of myogenic stem cells in vertebrates (Garry) [unreadable] (3) Spatial and temporal regulation of stem-cell factors in the Drosophila germline (McKearin) [unreadable] (4) Assays for regulatory steps in the yeast retrograde response pathway and inheritance of [unreadable] mitochondrial DNA (Butow) [unreadable] (5) Rapid imaging of molecules that mediate meiosis and cell fate specification in C. elegans (Lin) [unreadable] (6) Transcriptional regulators of pancreatic and salivary gland development (MacDonald) [unreadable] (7) Imaging protein interactions in developing motor neurons of C. elegans (Cameron) [unreadable] [unreadable] The Department of Molecular Biology supports this proposal by providing space, electrical modifications, and a yearly service contract. The grant will be administered by an advisory committee composed of 3 investigators (Waddle, Garry, and McKearin) and 2 faculty members [unreadable] (Amelia Eisch, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry) and Helmut Kramer (Associate Professor of Basic Neuroscience and Cell Biology) from outside departments at UT Southwestern. [unreadable] [unreadable]